Along the Ohio River on the Ohio-West Virginia border sits the pleasant city of Steubenville, Ohio, approximately 33 miles from the thriving hub of Pittsburgh, and smack dead on the former site of Fort Steuben, built to guard The Geographer of the United States at the time, a Mr. Thomas Hutchins. Although the fort would go down in flames in 1790, the city would continue to witness bloodshed and folly all the way leading up to the befuddling events of 1992, when a young rap artist and street hustler from New York City migrated to the town.
Back in 1992, “[Steubenville] was a blue collar town on the Ohio River,” recalls former Steubenville law practitioner Dominick E. Olivito Jr., who now presides over the Carroll County Common Pleas Court as Judge. “There were a lot of ethnic groups that had settled there, but most were second and third generation Americans.” Economically, the town’s spirits had been dwindling for a long while. “It [Steubenville] was spiraling down, losing population, and losing employment,” admits Olivito Jr. “There weren’t opportunities there for young people. It was a typical Ohio River mill town in decline.” And what happens to a small town when the job market dries up, relegating a large portion of the population to unemployment insurance? Well, crime begins to infiltrate. And that’s exactly around the time, in December of 1992, that 22 year old Robert F. Diggs, also know as Prince Rakeem, Bobby Digital, or most famously, the RZA, entered Steubenville and got mixed up in one of the most pivotal court trials in hip-hop history.

At the time, Christmas of 1992, the RZA was a self-proclaimed and rather bonafide street hustler, though his debut EP, Ooh I Love You Rakeem, had just begun to create minor waves in the New York City hip-hop scene. Rakeem came to Steubenville toting his minor street celeb to take advantage of an untapped crack market in Jefferson County, which had been fueled by the recent unemployment and rabid poverty. “After we got established there, it [Steubenville] became known as Little New York,” recounts the RZA in his 2009 book, The Tao of Wu. “We made money and were able to feed ourselves, but it was the most negative point in my life. This was the time I broke my one vow to myself.” The RZA had become a low-level drug dealer, or as he words it, he began “killing [his] own people”.
Nevertheless, the soon-to-be Wu abbot also journeyed to Steubenville for more civil reasons, namely to see his mother, Linda Hamlin, who resided in town. It was during one of these visits to Steubenville to see his mother - during Christmas of 1992 to be specific - that the young rapper wound up in his mother’s kitchen, entertaining some guests, when his sister came into the room and asked if he would drive three of her girlfriends home to the other side of town. Being a good brother, The RZA naturally agreed. But as he began to chaperone the young girls into his car, he learned that “one of these girls ha[d] a jealous boyfriend, and apparently the jealous boyfriend had beg[un] to follow them.” Seeing that the RZA was, at the time, a known drug dealer in town, wanted at large by his competitors, he chose to return home and pick up his brother for extra protection. So, again, all parties filed into the RZA’s car and attempted “to make this journey from one side of town to another side of town.” “It was like a movie,” describes then law practitioner and attorney to the RZA, Mr. Olivito Jr. “They [the assailants] knew the RZA, they knew of his little reputation, and they were envious. They’re thinking, ‘he’s scoring some points with the girls’”, and on top of everything else, he was probably stealing their business.

So, as the RZA arrives on the opposite side of town, a “declining part of town” as Mr. Olivito Jr. puts it, to drop off these girls, a set of headlights immediately floods the dead-end part of the street, cornering the RZA and his brother. Out of the lights emerges this 19 year old street hustler named Willie Walters, leader of the opposing gang, who, supposedly, jumps out his car and rushes the RZA “in a martial arts fashion”. Seeing again that the RZA hails from New York City, he deals drugs, and is a budding African American rapper, he has on him a .25 caliber firearm, tucked in his coat pocket. Hoping to scare Walters off, the RZA reaches for the gun in his pocket, but, as he goes to pull it out Walters charges, causing the RZA to recoil in panic. As he recoils, the RZA pulls down on the trigger and fires a straight shot down at the ground, which ricochets up and strikes Walters dead in the “lower rear thigh, upper buttocks.” A second shot follows, also from the RZA’s gun, and strikes his brother in the same manner, in the lower thigh, upper buttocks. After the smoke settles, blood is left trickling down the RZA’s brother’s leg, and Walters and his crew are bumbling back to their vehicle to get the hell out of there.

At least that’s the story according to the RZA and his lawyer, Mr. Dominick Olivito Jr., who worked in tandem to convince a Jefferson County jury with “one black guy on it” that Robert F. Diggs was in fact innocent of felonious assault with a firearm, which would have landed him in prison for eight years, altering the course of hip-hop forever… Think about it, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) came out in November of 1993, a little under two years after the RZA’s acquittal, and is still one of the most influential hip-hop albums of all-time. Enter the Wu-Tang jumpstarted the careers of such acclaimed rappers as Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, not to mention inspiring the likes of Kanye West and Just Blaze, who cite the RZA as one of their major influences. None of these careers would have come to fruition (more or less) if the RZA hadn’t convinced the jurors in Steubenville that he was in fact an honorable young man, an honest one at that, despite how the police wanted to obscure and exaggerate the case. “It seemed like the police wanted to get the RZA convicted because they thought he was a bad influence,” remarks Mr. Olivito Jr. “I think if the RZA had been convicted he would have gotten the maximum penalty from the judge.”

Let us consider the scenario from the police’s perspective then. Their town is dying, crime and drugs are about to leave a permanent scar on the community, and here comes this out-of-state drug dealer/minor celebrity who lands almost in their laps, wielding a .25 caliber pistol and a gun-shot victim in Willie Walters to boot. Hell, the police have got to be thinking, the RZA is the perfect scapegoat, blame the unsavory turn-of-events in Steubenville on his presence, almost symbolically, and kill two birds with one stone, dissuade other thugsters from moving in on Steubenville. No wonder the trial received so much publicity in local presses. The cops wanted to nail the RZA to the cross as the whole city looked on, so as to remove the blame from the city (or from the natural cycle of decay) and lay it on this one outsider. “Quite frankly, the police knew of his vocation and in a way I think they wanted to step on him. I think they were that mean that they wanted to step on him,” recalls Mr. Olivito of the cop’s mentality. “They [the police] had an opportunity to grind him and they took their best shot. They weren’t willing to listen to, ‘Well, what did the other guy do?’ What they wanted to say was, “what did Rakeem do?”

So, with all that in mind, how did the RZA ever manage to convince a jury that he, the supposed drug-slanging, gun-wielding, homicidal vagrant, was actually a good man with good morals and an important future ahead of him? Well, if you’ve ever watched the RZA’s poignant eulogy to his late friend Ol’ Dirty Bastard on Youtube, you can understand how communicable and persuasive the flowering rap artist could be, and still can be. Even the RZA’s lawyer, Mr. Olivito Jr., was able to recognize this stalwart tick in his client’s character, which he believes won the case for the RZA. “I think that his positiveness reached out to the jury. They saw his heart, they saw that he wasn’t a criminal, that he wasn’t what the prosecutor and the police would have wished the jury to see him as, as a scary, young, black man from New York coming to Steubenville to cause mischief and harm or otherwise. He completely dispelled that notion to the jury.” And he really did it by his own testimony. “I gave the most important performance of my life that day, and it was from the heart,” says the RZA of his time on the stand, to which Olivito Jr. adds, “I knew that he had plans for himself. I know that he had started his career and he knew where his career could go. He seemed to have a way of looking at himself, almost like an out-of-body experience. And when he and I would council and meet, getting prepared for the trial, he knew it then, that this was going to be one of those moments in his life that was going to change everything.”
 

Thus, although the RZA did originally come to Steubenville to make money, to capitalize on the somewhat infantile drug trade going on in the city, this was by no means relevant to the case at hand. The issue at hand was whether Willie Walter’s injuries had in fact been forceful, an assault with a firearm, or really an act of self-defense. In the end, the jury sided with the RZA, recognizing that the police intended to blame a city’s decay on one individual, when in reality, the entire community was responsible for the city’s economic downturn. “They knew the significance of the case,” added Mr. Olivito, remarking on the jurors. “They felt Rakeem had done nothing wrong, he had defended himself, and that this other man had been accidentally shot.” Both the RZA and Olivito admit now that some of the jurors were in fact crying upon coming out of the box, and one woman came up to Rakeem and said, “Now remember, don’t play with guns anymore.” The jurors were relieved that this young man would not lose eight years of his life, and they were very sympathetic to the fact that the police had not reviewed the facts properly. Mr. Olivito summed up the case rather succinctly in a press statement for the Weirton Intelligencer back in 1992. He’s quoted as saying, “the individual jurors had to be commended for shouldering the responsibility as jurors and recognizing an honest person and not being tricked by the chicanery the state tried to use to prove its case against him.”
And now, in retrospect, what can we take away from the Tale of RZA as the Steubenville Scapegoat? Well, for one, that the citizens of this small town did not bow down to the state’s malicious convictions for this one individual, and two, that they were able to correctly diagnose the goodness in an almost assuredly fettered street kid. The people of Steubenville corrected the state’s mal intentions, and proved once again why governments should be afraid of their citizens. Also, and most significant to us as music lovers, a brilliant musician was granted the proper freedom to pursue his gifts. And like Mrs. Linda Hamlin, RZA’s mother, lamented as she watched her son embark from the stand that Spring morning in Steubenville, “this is your second chance, son.”

By Peter Marrack 

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(Source: postdubstep, via fuckyeahwu-tangclan)